Beretta76

BandRock

Combining the urgency and unruliness of classic punk rock and topped with a spritz of sugary sweet pop, Beretta76 comes off sounding like their namesake, the Italian handgun that's come to symbolize both a sense of sleek style and deadly force.

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Biography

Beretta76 (note spelling - all one word, no space) just released their debut CD - the self-produced Black Beauty – after being together since 2002, having Jane Magazine choose one of their songs to appear on their 2002 Reader Produced CD, releasing an eponymous EP, and opening for acts such as Fountains of Wayne, The Fratellis, Cracker, Earl Greyhound, Shonen Knife, The Muffs, and The Fleshtones.

No Philadelphia quartet deals with whiskey nights and stark urbanity like they do. That attitude seeps through the pores of guitarist/composer Pete Rydberg, bassist Ben Brower, and drummer Rob Giglio, even when raging through Beretta76's thickest wordless passages. But throw in sex, beauty queens, one hour stands, attitude-y princesses, more sex, old rock scribes throwing dismal dinner parties, and even more sex (there's a woman wrapped in a cobra on the cover for a reason, hoss); make it blunt, unprissy, immediate, pissed off, melodic and raw-rocking without lacking in precision; toss in the punch of power pop and the cutting clarion foxiness of singer and guitarist Camille Escobedo... it's a brutal Beauty you got in your hands. It's a record that hones their acerbic agit-power-pop into something that's sleek, tender, taut and tough without ever embracing rock from a feminist aspect.

While most of Black Beauty’s sound is gi-hugic and riff heavy - capturing arena-style bigness compacted into a fist of fury – “Pretty Baby” is lilting and textured ear candy. They roll through the sunny but sneering Sex-Pistols-meets-The-Association p-p-punk of “Hit Parade.” That song, one of their first, is a catty beauty-queen-be-damned blueprint for Beretta76’s attitude and an approach that figures into the tattered princess pop of “Paper Doll”. That doesn’t last. Beretta76 take a hard slow ride on the Kinks-ish metal of “Hold You in Hell” - a song that, like “Legs,” finds itself pissed-off at one person in particular. “Just Another Trick” is Pete’s tune about playing the field, a power-pop reverie with an Amazing Gobstopper comparison to go with its cooing harmonies. “You never know how many layers of candy you have to get through to find that cyanide center, “ says Rydberg.

It’s Escobedo and Rydberg’s uneasy song writing mesh that makes Beretta76 truly bitchy. It doesn’t matter whether they’re sharing tales of hand-wrung romance or snide observations regarding tricks, tarts, and sharks. Beretta76 is about the moment – the one where someone leans into a power chord and personal data gets digested to make an explosion of riff and image. That’s the key to this quartet’s success.

Black Beauty is rough and raw without being sloppy. Beretta76 is loosely compact and detail oriented. At a time when the internets lets you click on-and-off within a second, you have to be. “More than ever, bands have one shot to make an impression,” says Rydberg of making each track white hot from the second it starts. Being honest about what and who they are just made Beretta76 hotter still.